


The Two Pills Solution

by MomentumDeferred, tj_teejay



Series: The *other* Sunshineverse(s) [7]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Apocalypse, Blood, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Neurological Disorders, Post-Apocalypse, Sunshineverse, Survival, Terminal Illnesses, Whump, feral!Matt, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-14 19:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5755993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt comes home with road rash. Neither Foggy nor Karen are greatly amused, especially when it’s the arm with the tremor that they have to pick all the tiny pieces of gravel out of. But then Karen gets to witness Foggy’s perfect solution for that little problem. (Plays in the same universe as MomentumDeferred's story <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4217547">“Sunshine”</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Operation Gravel Extraction

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Sunshine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4217547) by [MomentumDeferred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred). 



> **Author's Note:** Those of you who have read ‘The One Patch Problem’ and ‘Make It Home Again’ may have a good idea what’s coming. About time that Matt got to enjoy this again!
> 
>  **Timeframe:** More shenanigans during their chapter 18 off-time in the apartment.
> 
>  **Additional Note:** If you haven't already, it's recommended that you read the [The Best Days Of Our Lives](http://half-feral.tumblr.com/post/138597463211/the-best-days-of-our-lives) ficlet before you dive into this one. Apologies for only posting it _after_ uploading this one to AO3. (Major d'oh.)

“Oh, not _again_ ,” Karen could hear Foggy say with a sigh.

Yep, they were here again. Matt tumbling in through the window with... ugh. What looked like half his face shaved off. Half his arm, too. The skin there was a raw mess of scratches, scrapes, dirt, flesh, and blood. Post-apocalyptic road rash at its best.

“What the hell did you do _this_ time, Matt?” Foggy chastised. Which was predictable. Foggy hated this shit. She couldn’t say she particularly enjoyed it either.

Matt just grunted, let the bulging backpack drop to the floor, and peeled off his jacket. What remained of it—which wasn’t a whole lot where his left sleeve was concerned. “Fucking feral,” he ground out. “Was a lot big.”

Foggy was already up and inspecting the damage more closely. “So I’m guessing he dragged you along the surface of the road for, like, half a mile? Cause that’s what it fucking looks like.”

Matt scrunched up his face. “Yes. Drag. Not good.”

There was one of those resigned Foggy sighs. She’d heard them often enough. “Yeah, I’d say. Sit down on the futon. We have a lot of work to do.”

Matt didn’t stay on the futon very long, because Foggy concluded that this needed serious groundwork first. Groundwork that included lots of water. They helped Matt peel himself out of his three layers of clothing, which made grey city dust float everywhere—not that it mattered.

Together they ventured down into the garage, to their little make-shift showering corner. Matt looked as miserable and small as Karen felt. He hated this shit, too. They all did. But for him, it just couldn’t be helped. Collateral damage. There was a lot of it these days, and it kept repeating itself.

Karen didn’t think she could ever get used to the sight of a shirtless Matt whose body denoted so much sordid history—so many stories of hardship, physical pain, assault, and suffering. She could still see each and every one of his ribs, a disheartening cast of neglect and deprivation. The countless scars were another reminder. The sum of years of years of kicking ass and getting his ass equally kicked. Each one with a memory attached, even though Matt would probably never remember a large portion of them.

They put Matt on a stool below the shower bucket. Karen had the clarity of mind to cover his legs with a blanket and an old garbage bag to keep the hypothermia at bay. They used a lot of water to clear away the dust and superficial dirt from his wounds. More of it came away when Foggy used a damp towel to carefully rub over the abrasions. Matt hissed a lot, but Karen could tell he was trying his best not to complain.

She put one of the beach towels around his shoulders when Foggy was done, helping him dry himself off. He was shivering violently, and it wasn’t just the tremor. She rubbed his right bicep and shoulder through the towel, although he didn’t really seem to notice.

“Okay, now for the fun part,” Foggy commented, when they were ready to go back upstairs. The jibe fell flat in the frigid, uninviting space around them.

They set up shop on the futon again. Foggy had the saline ready to clean out some if the deeper wounds. A set of tweezers, Q-tips, disinfectant, antibiotic ointment. Karen supplied a bowl for the gravel which she held while Foggy started reaching the tweezers into the mess of skin and blood on Matt’s arm.

The tremor was a son of a bitch. So much so that Foggy ended up inadvertently poking Matt several times with the sharp instrument, which in turn had Matt hissing unhappy growls at him. After the fifth time, Foggy let his hands sink into his lap with a resigned sigh. The bowl Karen held had only three tiny pieces of rock in it.

“This isn’t working,” he said.

“Sorry,” Matt immediately apologized, but he sounded almost pissed off.

“Yeah, it’s your stupid tremor. I just... for the life of me, I can’t do the kind of precision work that this requires if you keep twitching your arm away the second I think I have the little suckers in my grasp.”

“Foggy, this not— I can’t stop. This. Shaking, I can’t stop this.”

She watched Foggy sigh once more. “Yes, I know that. I didn’t mean... I know you’re not doing it on purpose. It just... it just makes this really hard. I wish there was a way we could suspend it, at least for a while so I can get all this shit out of you.”

Karen’s gaze was fixed on Matt’s left hand, which was still twitching uncontrollably. Even more so than before, because the tremor was always worse if he got worked up over something. And this had him worked up, because Foggy was hitting a dead end, and Matt wanted to do everything he could to meet him halfway, but there was that viral chasm between them that couldn’t be bridged if they tried.

Her offer was a feeble one. “Would it help if I held his arm? Or if he held on to something and gripped it really hard?”

“It might,” Foggy said. “But probably not enough. God, we need some kind of—”

There was a sudden silence. Karen asked, “Some kind of what?”

Foggy got up from the futon. “You know what? I have an idea.”

She watched him rummage around in his medical supplies, extracting a cardboard medication package that he pulled a blister out of. She couldn’t read what it said, and even if she did, it would probably not tell her a whole lot.

“I found this at the Walgreens we raided. You know, the dislocated arm disaster?”

Matt immediately pulled a discontented grimace. Karen just nodded. “What is it?”

“I’ve been meaning to save it for a special occasion. Not sure I had _this_ in mind, but, well...”

It was Matt who asked, “Foggy, what is it?”

He put the blister in Matt’s right hand, and he carefully felt it. Foggy asked, “Do you remember the dopamine agonist patch, way back when, in the shelter?”

“Yes. It make shaking stop.”

“It sure did. This is something like that. It’s not the same drug, but I think they work similarly. It would really help if you took it, because then I could work on your arm and get all the little pieces out without hurting you even more. It’d be much faster, too, if you could keep your arm still.”

“I take this, shaking stops?”

“Yeah. That’s the theory, anyway.”

“It is safe?”

Foggy let out a long breath. “I don’t know, Matt. I hope it will be. The patch worked just fine and you didn’t have any side effects from that, did you? So I’m willing to give it a shot if you are.”

It didn’t take convincing. Cause fuck yeah, Matt would love getting rid of the tremor. Even Karen knew how much it messed with him. He confirmed it quickly. “I want to take.”

Foggy nodded. “All right. I don’t know how long it’ll take before we see an effect, though. It could take a while.”

“Is okay,” Matt told him. “I want to take.”

Foggy pushed two pills out of the blister and put them in Matt’s palm. He had probably read the package insert—he was meticulous with that stuff. The pills were downed quickly with half a glass of water.

Karen looked at him. “You’ve given him something like this before?”

“Yeah. It was when we were living at the shelter, before you found out. It was... it was a patch that you stuck on the skin. Transdermal something. It was pretty amazing, made the tremor go away completely for about a day. Tell her about it, Matt.”

He smiled slightly. It looked out of place with half his face covered in crimson scrapes. “It make shaking go away. I touched a lot. Was—it was amazing.”

Karen felt herself smile. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“I want to touch more. A lot more.”

Foggy supplied, “And you can, once we’ve freed you of all the foreign objects you collected when you involuntarily swept the street with your scrawny little body.”

That made Matt grumble. “Not scraw.”

“Scraw _ny_. And, yes, you are. We need to get some meat on those bones. Seriously, it’s kinda wrong that you’re still this thin.”

After that, it was just them waiting for the drugs to take effect. Foggy tried moving on to Matt’s face, because the twitching there was a lot less frequent, but that didn’t work so well either.

In the end, they just resigned themselves to their fate, and talked about inconsequential things like what the new Star Wars movie might have covered if it had ever actually come to theaters. Foggy was convinced that it would bring back Darth Vader, while Karen insisted he was very much dead.

“Nothing’s truly dead where the Dark Side of the Force is concerned,” he insisted.

Matt could only supply, “Vader is a dick,” which didn’t really help, as correct as that statement may be. His weird pronunciation still made it sound like ‘bader’.

They were maybe twenty minutes into this discussion, when Matt softly tapped Foggy on the shoulder. “Foggy, look this. At _this_.”

His left arm was outstretched, poking out from under the fleece blanket he had pulled around himself over the towel, and... the tremor was gone. Foggy touched his hand, grinning, apparently happy with the development. “That’s awesome, Matt. It’s working.”

“Works!” Matt beamed. “Can I touch?”

“Uh... don’t you want us to take the gravel out of your wounds first? I thought that was the whole point of this.”

“Not point. _Not_ only one.”

“Yeah, but it’s an important point. Come on, let’s get that over with, then you can touch all the things.”

“Touch your face?”

Surprise bubbled up inside Karen, because it seemed such an intimate thing, and... ugh. But Foggy just smiled. “Yeah, you can touch my face again if you want. But it’s not like it’s changed since the last time.”

“I want more memory.”

“That’s cool, Matt. You can commit my ugly mug to memory as much as you want. After Operation Gravel Extraction, okay?”

There was another one of Matt’s unhappy signature grunts. It was still beyond her how he didn’t give a fuck that he had a million tiny shards of road surface embedded in his skin, but, well, it was probably the excitement of the moment. Endorphins, or something.

“More faster,” Matt said to Foggy.

“Jesus Christ. Okay. Help me with this, Karen.”

She took the bowl back up, but Foggy gave her a second set of tweezers. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“He said we need to be faster. This will make it way faster.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

They worked in unison, the silence only broken by the occasional clinking of rock against porcelain. It still took a long time, even with Matt holding as still as he possibly could. In the end, the cereal bowl was a quarter full with pieces of gravel.

Foggy let out a long breath and held his tweezers in front of his chest. “That’s the last one I could find. Have we missed any?”

Matt squinted his eyes, then closed them for three or four seconds. He pointed to a spot above his elbow. “Here.”

Foggy looked at it, squeezed a little bit of saline from his syringe into the wound. “Okay, yeah, I see it.” He extracted it. “Got the little fucker. Anywhere else?”

“Yes.” This time he pointed to his temple next to his eye. “One.”

Karen was sitting closer to this one and went to examine it. Foggy helped out with the saline. She found it quickly. “Here we go.” It joined the heap of rocks in the bowl.

Matt did a last self-inventory. “This is all. You did, mm, well job.”

She gave him a little pat on the shoulder. “Not quite, Matt. It’s ‘good job’.”

“You did good job.”

This time Foggy corrected it. Total teacher teamwork. “ _A_ good job.”

Matt rolled his eyes, but repeated dutifully, “You did a good job.”

She nodded in a fake-curtsey manner. “Why, thank you, Matt.”

His mind was already elsewhere. “You are finished, Foggy?”

“Hold your horses, Buckaroo. We still gotta disinfect and dress it.”

“No, I don’t want this.”

“Aw, Matt, do we have to have this discussion _every_ fucking _time_?”

“No, Foggy. You stop do, I stop say.”

“Yeah, very funny. I’m disinfecting this shit. All of it. You had tons of fucking dirt embedded right in your soft tissue. I’ve seen pictures of gangrenous skin, and I’m telling you, it’s not pretty. It probably smells really bad, too. We’re not having that if I can help it.”

She wasn’t looking forward to this part. The disinfectant stung, the antibiotic ointment wasn’t pleasant either, and Matt still protested when Foggy wrapped gauze bandages around his arm. Knowing Matt, they’d probably be discarded—at the _latest_ —the next day. But, all in all, Matt was still pretty lucky that they had Foggy, and that they had each other.

Finally, freshly cleaned, vetted and fully dressed, Matt was cleared for tactile exploration. All the curiosity and expectation was shining on his face—bright and glorious. It made both Karen and Foggy smile along vicariously.

They watched with baited breath, and suddenly Karen felt a little self-conscious. A voyeur in a forbidden area, peeking through the blinds. But Matt didn’t seem to mind, and Foggy didn’t give five fucks. He was waiting for this, so why should she feel guilty?

Matt stood there in front of the futon, turning in this and that direction. Probably deciding what to do first. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

“Foggy,” he said. “Can I touch your face?”

“Yeah, man, have at it.”

Now Karen definitely felt weird. This was intimate. Too intimate. Alarm bells started screaming, cause Matt would probably—he would probably ask her too, and then she’d have to say no, and they all knew how that would end.

She harrumphed. “I’m, uh... I’m gonna be back, okay?”

She didn’t wait for a reply, and quickly slunk down to the garage. There, at the bottom of the stairs, she allowed herself a relieved sigh. _Shit, Page. That wasn’t very graceful_ , she chided herself. Too late now.

There weren’t a great many things down there that needed immediate attention, so she busied herself with checking The Falcon—their truck. Matt had given it that name, once Foggy had finished telling him the story of Star Wars. He just couldn't quite get the word _Millennium_ out smoothly enough to include it. Oil levels, windshield washer fluid, the belts, tire tread, light bulbs, the works. It could use an oil change, she noted to herself.

A good amount of time passed—she wasn’t sure how much—before she heard feet on the stairs. Matt was Mr. Stealth, so she concluded that it could only be Foggy. It was.

He had a towel in one hand, shower gel and fresh underwear in the other. He gave her a lopsided smile. “Hey, uhm, I’m gonna shower. It’s cool if you wanna stay down here. No peeking, though. I can tell, I can always tell,” he mock-chided her.

“No, I’ll, uh... I’ll go back upstairs.”

“Sure. Okay.”

He had the decency not to mention her quick exit before. Her inner voice whispered, _Thank you, Foggy._

Upstairs, she wasn’t sure what to expect when she came into the living room. But somehow, it hadn’t been this. Matt was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room on one of the blankets. He was very quiet with a serene little smile on his face, his fingers reverently tracking the folds of a tiny paper airplane that he’d probably meticulously folded.

She stopped in the doorway and waited, almost afraid to disturb the peaceful moment. Maybe she should have—

“Hi. Karen,” he greeted her. There, the spell was broken.

“Hey, Matt. What are you doing?”

“Listening...?”

“To what?”

He hummed, softly and unsurely. The answer was probably ‘everything’. Maybe he was taking his vibration sense for a spin, now that there was no one-sided distraction. Then he said. “All. All this... all.”

Yeah. Everything indeed. “And what did you hear?”

“Hear... a lot.”

Okay, she’d walked right into that one. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” He said it quickly, decisively. _Fuck no, you stay._

“Okay. I’ll, uh... Don’t mind me. Keep doing your thing.”

She went into the kitchen to retrieve the green notebook from the medical duffel. Armed with a pen, she went to the couch and opened it, found the pages where she kept track of her truck maintenance. There was a yearly calendar glued to the inside of the cover, and Foggy tried to keep track of the days, crossing them off one by one. According to that, it was December 16 today.

She dated her entry and wrote down what she’d checked. She’d done most of those checks only two weeks ago, but, well, better safe than sorry.

That notebook, it had a certain magical quality to it. She ended up leafing around in it, re-reading Foggy’s painstaking log of the sixty-eight plateaus and their devastating after-effects. At the same time, she was stealing glances at Matt, the way his fingers glided along the edges of the paper airplane, the intense concentration in every one of his features.

His face was an open book of the most beautiful poetry you’d ever find. The corners of his mouth would twitch every now and then, but not involuntarily. This was full-on reaction to sounds and movements he was picking up. Tiny vibrations, for all she knew. And that tiny smile hidden there, it contained all the wonder and happiness and gratefulness of a man who had lost everything, and was putting one of the long-lost important pieces into the puzzle back that someone had carelessly swept under the sofa.

Foggy had found it, that long-lost puzzle piece, in the form of those little light blue pills, the ones that would make the picture just a little less confusing and out of focus. At least for a while.

Matt’s smile widened, just a tiny fraction, and she could see it if she looked closely enough. She’d somehow learned to look closely, to read his expression without looking at his eyes. Foggy was still way more skilled at it, but she was getting better. And faster.

Pulling the blanket that was loosely draped over the backrest over her cold legs, she watched him get up from his sitting position and over to the wall. He effortlessly found the frame with their portrait— _his_ portrait. The one Karen had made for him when he’d gone out of his way to make _her_ feel better. When he’d injured both of his arms in the process, the altruistic, sweet person that he still was beneath that broken façade most people would never be able to look past. The one she had taken a long time to scrape away.

He took it off the wall and the fingers of his left hand ran along the edges of the outlines she’d drawn so deeply into the cardboard that it had left ridges on one side. A literal portrait of the three of them that he could feel. He was exploring it again, as if it was the first time. He had his eyes closed now, and the corners of his lips were twitching upward. Something in Karen’s stomach gave a flip. It still confused the hell out of her when it happened.

Matt put the picture down on the coffee table with unrivaled carefulness. Next to the CD player, she knew it was one of his most prized possessions that he’d always treasure. It intensified that strange feeling in her stomach. She quickly tried to dispel it by focusing her attention back on the contents of the notebook.

He was suddenly in front of her, trying hard to give her his full attention. She looked closely again, and the strained lines around his eyes told her something too. He was trying to find the right words, and somehow she had realized a while ago that he always tried extra hard when he spoke to her. Foggy had said as much, and then she’d finally started to see it herself.

“Karen,” he said, in that soft voice of his.

She waited. Something she’d also learned from Foggy. Don’t interrupt him. Give him time to find the words. Don’t feed his frustration. It was a shame the dopamine agonist didn’t do anything for the aphasia. She doubted anything could—save for them continuing to push him to do better.

He’d come such a long way. He would go even farther with her and Foggy’s help. She could see that now.

“You… can you… mm. Up? Come up?”

She felt herself frown. “To the roof?”

“Mm, no. Up… get. Get up.”

“You mean you want me to stand up?”

“Yes.” He gave a little nod, and that in itself was amazing, because on any normal day his twitching head and involuntary muscle spasms wouldn’t let him do that anymore. This wasn’t a normal day.

She peeled herself out of the blanket, immediately feeling the cold seep through her ill-fitting jeans. She stood half an inch taller than he did when she got up from the couch.

He took a step closer, his expression expectant, but also a hint of anxiousness hidden there. They stood awkwardly for a long moment, until she asked, “What is it, Matt?”

“I, hm. I want to… Karen, can _I_ ask this? You. _Can_ I ask you this?”

“You can ask me anything. You know that.”

“Ask you to do this.”

Oh. Yeah, they’d had their touchy, precarious moments. He knew because Foggy had explained it. He understood there was something rooted deep, even if he didn’t fully grasp the extent of it. She wasn’t sure he ever would. It was something she’d taught herself not to dwell on, or even think about, but he was scratching at her façade, too. A millimeter at a time.

No, she didn’t want to go there. The wall had to stay strong. She huffed once, tried to make her voice neutral. “Yes, go ahead and ask.”

But then he was withdrawing, more hesitant, taking half a step back. “You don’t want.”

Shit. She was messing it up. Her stupid, irrational body was betraying her, and damn Matt and his super senses. She closed the gap between them, and he let her. It took effort to make the softness in her voice match his. She wanted to, because he always tried so damn hard. She owed it to him to try harder, more than she had in the past. As hard as she could.

“It’s okay, Matt. Really. I will try, I promise. What is it that you want me to do?”

He lifted his head, and his eyes almost met hers. An inch off, maybe. His voice was so low that it was almost inaudible. “I want to touch… _your_ hands.”

She was afraid he’d say ‘face’, cause then she’d be teetering on the edge of that panic zone she’d tried to get the hell away from earlier.

Hands. Yes, she could do hands. Maybe Foggy had talked to him about this after she bolted. He probably had. She lifted her arms just slightly from where they hung at her sides. “Tell me what to do.”

He reached out—very gingerly. His fingers were cold. They were always cold. It was the virus, and the way it lowered his core temperature. But his grip was soft, and she let him take the initiative.

His fingers came around her palm, and he gently guided her hands upward between them. Halfway up, he directed her movement so that their palms faced each other. He stopped when they were at shoulder level, neither of them daring to speak. She didn’t move, waited for him to dictate the next step.

There was no next step. He just stood, his palms against hers, silent and motionless. Two children frozen in a game of patty cake.

She watched him close his eyes, his face drawing into the deep kind of reverent attention he would spare for the special moments. The important ones. He drew in a deep breath and held it, and she could feel herself doing the same.

She’d never seen him so still, not even under sedation. There was always a tiny tremor somewhere, a twitch, an involuntary jerking reaction he couldn’t control. This stillness was completely uncanny, and it was the strangest sensation.

Suddenly, she could feel her heart thumping in her chest, hammering a steady beat that was becoming faster. Unbidden and uncontrollable, her breath hitched. Matt could feel it. Of course he could. He broke the contact. The moment of regret was as raw as it would ever be. She had disappointed him again.

But he wasn’t disappointed—not if his expression was any indication. That smile was still on his lips, maybe wider than ever. His voice was barely more than a breath. “Thank you, Karen.”

And then her eyes filled with tears, and it took everything inside of her not to let her arms come around him to draw him into a hug. It was moments like this that she could forget this kind, gentle man could easily snap a feral’s neck with his bare hands if it meant it would protect her and Foggy. Moments like this that she saw the old Matt hidden in there, the one that Foggy had tied a lifeline to that he would never let go of.

She wanted to have a piece of that lifeline, too. Just two inches at the end that she could cling onto with one hand. Maybe he was giving her permission to. She hoped he did.

“Just now, what did you feel, Matt?”

His smile widened. His answer was simple, and this time it wasn’t only the virus. “You.”

“Tell me.”

He tilted his head half an inch to the left. “I hear you. Feel your heart. It… mm, makes sound. Shakes.”

“It’s called a heartbeat. It beats. That’s what you hear and feel, when it pumps blood through my body.”

“It is special.”

“Special? What do you mean?”

“You have heartb-beat. Foggy has. Is not— they are not the same.”

“You can tell us apart by our heartbeat?”

“Yes.” It sounded like that should have been obvious. Maybe it should. There were so many things she should know. She wanted to learn them all.

“What else, Matt? How do you see me?”

“Is a lot of sounds. Can feel. Inside.” He tapped his palm with a finger, both hands steady. His fingertips traced his skin there. Then he placed a hand flat on his chest and took a deep breath in and out. “This.”

“My breathing.”

He nodded again. A real nod.

He went on, “Inside when you move. Makes sound not a lot. Small sounds.” The index and middle fingers of his left hand touched the intermediate phalange of his right ring finger. “This not good, your finger?”

Her forehead drew into a frown. What was he talking about? There was nothing wrong with her fingers. Except… “You can feel that I broke my finger there?”

“Yes.”

“That was, oh God, I don’t know. A long time ago. It happened in school, we were playing volleyball. It’s a sport, where you shoot a ball back and forth over a net with your hands and arms, and it’s not allowed to touch the ground. It’s a game with two teams who play against each other. A competitive game.” He probably had no idea in hell what she was talking about.

But he wasn’t interested in that. “Finger, does not hurt?”

“No, it’s fully healed. Until now, I didn’t even remember that it happened.”

He seemed happy with that explanation. His right hand came up to his right ear. “Can feel this. Is not… is not good. Not the same, not…”

“You mean it’s not like my other ear?”

“Your scar. You telled me.”

“ _Told_ , Matt.”

“Told me.”

“I did. How can you feel that?”

He hummed one of his ‘I don’t know how to explain it’ hums. She could tell those by now. “Sounds not the same.”

She sighed. He needed more vocabulary. “Sounds _different_. When something’s not the same, you say ‘different’. Like the way you’re different, the way you perceive all these things differently from us. I wish you could explain all this to Foggy and me. How you see the world. I would love to know.”

His brow knitted together, a wave of emotion washing over his face that twisted it into a momentary grimace of defeat and sorrow.

No, no, no, cancel cancel! She’d said the wrong thing again. Fuck. She was terrible at this. Her mind screamed, _‘Foggy to the rescue!’_ but he wasn’t there. She needed to dig herself out. But how?

“Matt. Hey. No, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re amazing. Everything about you is amazing. Foggy and I, we can see it. Every day. And it sucks that the virus did this to you, and that sometimes you can’t say all the things you want to say, but that’s why we keep asking you. Why we keep pushing you.

“Because you can relearn. You already have. You can win some of that back. And we’ll… we will just be patient, okay? It doesn’t happen all at once, although I think sometimes we all wish it did.”

The defeat was still in his face when he said, slowly, “I _want_ to tell. It is in my head, I want _to_ tell.”

Almost instinctively, she reached out and took his hand. His left one. She felt him startle for a fleeting moment, but she held on and squeezed, and suddenly her mind flashed with an old memory.

They were standing in front of their Nelson & Murdock building, they’d just affixed their brand new sign to the door. He’d made an off-hand comment about avocados at law—how was she even still remembering that? She’d never gotten the full story on it, and made a mental note to ask Foggy later.

Foggy was rushing off somewhere, but Matt had stayed there, and he asked some concerned little question, and he held out his hand because… because that was just the kind of person he was.

_There's been something in your voice._

Fuck. She was tearing up again. She hated it. He would be able to tell, and then he’d ask—

“Karen?”

She let her hand slide out of their touch and wiped the ball of her thumb across her eyes, sniffed once. “It’s fine. An old memory. From before. It was nice.”

“You want to tell me?”

That was another touchy subject, and Foggy would definitely be shooting her a warning look by now if he were here. Matt still wasn’t good at the ‘before’ stories. Sometimes it was better not to remind him of all the things he would never have or be anymore.

“Only if you promise not to be sad about it. It’s not a sad memory.”

“Don’t want to be sad.”

“Yeah, that makes two of us. Come on, let’s sit on the couch, I’ll tell you.”

He instinctively sat down to her left, because he knew she didn’t like it when she felt the tremor, it was so ingrained in his brain now. She steered him to sit down to her right. “No, come and sit on this side.”

He looked confused, but then smiled. These little pills were the shit. She wondered how Foggy had known about them. Another thing to add to the list of questions for later. She scooted closer yet so that their thighs almost touched. Her thumb softly brushed against the back of his left hand and she said, “Take my hand. I want you to know it’s not a sad memory.”

“Karen,” he breathed out, as if he knew it was a big thing she was offering. Maybe it was. It didn’t feel like one.

“It’s okay, Matt. Really. You can tell I’m not lying, right?”

“Yes.”

His cold hand slid into hers and she squeezed again, then let her fingers linger there. He kept his still as well and she started, “Foggy told you about how we all met, didn’t he? What you were doing before the aliens attacked?”

“We were law _yers_.” It sounded distorted when he said it, strangely out of shape. Two words when it was really only one. “Had office. You, Foggy, me.”

“Yeah, we did. This was in the early days. We had just won a huge case. Well, no, not really a case. But we helped put away a criminal, a really powerful bad guy. It was a big deal.”

“Fisk?”

Karen did a double-take. “Yeah, Wilson Fisk. Do you remember him?”

“No. Foggy te— _told_ me.”

Ah, well, that explained it. “Yeah, but that’s not important. We had helped put him in prison where he would be punished for what he’d done. And we celebrated, and we had a sign made that had your names on it. It said ‘Nelson & Murdock – Attorneys at Law’, and Foggy put it up on the building where we worked. We all looked at it, and we were all really proud. We had done a good thing.”

“You were pr-proud of me?”

“Not just you. Of all of us. We were pretty awesome. Still are. And Foggy had to rush off somewhere, and you… you took my hand. Because you—I don’t really remember. You just…” she let out a long breath. It was hard to describe, even with all the words in her head. “I don’t know, you just did. I remember that. It was nice. I liked it. We were a little family then.”

“Are family now.”

He squeezed her hand just a little bit, and she returned the gesture. “Yes, we are.”

And whatever it was, maybe it was his thumb tracing tiny circles on the back of her hand, but she felt herself leaning into him. He didn’t shy away, so she let herself surrender and went the whole way, leaning against his side, letting her head make contact with his bony shoulder. She could feel him stiffen, but it only lasted a short second before he relaxed again. And then his head leaned sideways, and they sat completely still like that for a long time.

A warmth spread through her that she couldn’t understand. Maybe it was a feeling of being home. Of finding that place where you belonged. He and Foggy, they had given that to her. Most days she didn’t treasure it enough. She vowed not to take it for granted as often as she did.

It was like that Foggy found them when he came up from the garage, hair wet and a damp towel in his arms. Her first instinct was to jerk away and pretend as if they’d never touched, and Matt flinched along with her, but she quickly reinforced the grip on his hand and pulled their interlinked hands back between them.

Foggy looked like he was gonna spoil the moment with one of his trademark quips, so she quickly pre-empted, “I will cut out your tongue if you say anything sappy or sarcastic.”

He lifted his arms defensively, the towel still in one of them. “All right, Lara Croft. Your weapons are potent. I surrender and shall say no more.”

“You better.”

Foggy’s voice was softer, more genuine, when he said, “Anything I’ve been missing that I should know about?”

It was Karen who answered first. She tried to keep her voice light and teasing. “Nope. What happens in Brooklyn stays in Brooklyn.”

He let out a chuckle, “Okay, okay. You’re allowed to have secrets.”

But Matt was now making an unhappy face, and Karen immediately regretted her jibe. “Hey, Matt, it’s okay. I was joking around. Do you wanna tell Foggy?”

“You don’t want, Karen.”

“No, it’s totally fine. You can tell Foggy if you like.”

“Why you not say, Karen?”

She thought about it for a second. “Well... sometimes it’s nice to have things you can keep between two people only, you know? So that they stay special. Does that make sense?”

He seemed to ponder it for a long time, then a small smile spread across his face. “Foggy, this special. Okay, Foggy?”

Foggy looked at Matt, and if there was one person who understood it, it was him. “Of course, dude. You can have all the special memories with Karen you want.”

And that made Matt smile, and it made Karen smile, and she knew this truly was home. She never wanted to lose that again. She hoped she wouldn’t have to, but if she’d learned one thing in this new, fucked up world, it was that nothing good ever lingered longer than it had to.

She let out a small sigh. At least they could treasure what they had in the now. “Are you hungry? Anyone want, uh… what’s on the specials menu today?”

“Water, water, or water,” Foggy supplied. “Dry cereal. Expired tomato soup. Crunchy pasta.”

“Wasn’t there cake mix you dug out a while ago?”

“Yeah. So what do we do with it? We don’t have an oven.”

“Fuck that, we’ll just eat the dough.”

“We don’t have any eggs or butter.”

“I think you can use applesauce as an alternative. I read that somewhere once.”

“Well, we don’t have that either.”

Matt was already up and on the way to his curtain rod. “I can find. Applesauce, what is it?”

Karen saw Foggy sigh. “It’s pureed apple. It’s a fruit. It’s similar to canned pear, maybe a little more sour. And crunchier, at least when it’s fresh.”

“Where can I find? Is can?”

“It comes in jars, I think. Or little individual plastic cups. It’s hard to explain.”

“You come? Help find?”

“Why don’t you take Karen?”

Matt turned to her. “You come help find?”

Did she? Heck yeah, maybe another chance to use her new rifle again. “Sure. Do you wanna go right now?”

“Yes, right n-now.”

She shrugged. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Matt beamed. Of course he did. “Come, Karen. Foggy, you want?”

“Do I want you to bring anything specific?”

“Yes, Foggy, you want speci…ff…fic?”

“Nah. Go and do your thing. Take good care of Karen.”

He gave Foggy a ‘duh’ expression. “Yes,” he just said.

She smiled as he ushered her down the stairs with his curtain rod in hand. It was still scary outside, but with Matt by her side, she always felt a lot safer. Even on foot. And now that he was tremor free, he’d be even more badass than he already was.

“Okay, Monkey Man. Lead the way.”

+-+-+-+-+


	2. Mission Applesauce

It was always a double-edged sword to go out with Matt. Karen knew he loved the freedom of the outdoors, his city all around him—even if it wasn’t Manhattan. But it was also dangerous. He would be able to easily fight off a handful of ferals, but an alien?

She'd seen him kill one, of course. With a knife, because he was totally insane. However, she was not keen on a repeat performance of that particular stunt, especially not with her in attendance of the spectacle. Still, they hadn’t seen or heard any aliens for a long time, so she hoped they were reasonably safe. Matt would have listened for them before they went out. They would be fine.

She’d been out and about with Matt and Foggy a number of times, but never with Matt alone. She loved getting to see him in his element: running around like a goddamn moron and climbing around on burnt trees and buildings like he'd been born up there. They'd started down their cracked street with the remains of what had once been grass pushing up through the asphalt, Matt quietly taking the lead, Karen trailing behind.

“So where are we going exactly?” she asked him, adjusting the strap of her rifle across her shoulder. It kept getting stuck on one of the shoulder belts of her daypack.

He pointed up the street. “This. Blocks, mm. More blocks. Don’t know.”

“So basically just a ‘let’s-see-what-we-can-find’ kind of thing?”

Matt stopped and regarded her, a confused expression on his face. “Karen... I don’t understand.”

“It’s fine, Matt. Just carry on. I’ll follow you, okay?”

Matt gave her a wide, pure grin and pointed in the same direction again. “You walk there. I follow.”

She realized why he’d said it a second later, when he took off like a gunshot, hopping expertly up a half-collapsed wall, climbing it like a normal person would climb stairs, leaping across the yawning canyon of a shattered window without a ceiling, landing lightly on the other side.

“Jesus Christ, Matt,” she whispered, even though he could probably hear it just as well. She’d seen him do this shit a number of times, but it still amazed her. It brought back a memory of that time when he’d first saved her, back at her old apartment. As Daredevil. Over a pension file. He’d been all crazy backflips and ninja moves then, too.

She watched him scramble up one of the still-standing corner walls, using it to get to a higher floor. He stepped carefully along the bowing ruins of the flooring, keeping his feet on the reinforcing struts instead of the deteriorating linoleum. His head tilted as he constantly analyzed the environment, checking for danger, letting in the sounds and the rare, tremor-free vibrations and allowing himself to coast through them with a practiced, graceful ease.

He leapt across a good seven-foot gap to land on the edge of a staircase, then started down it, slipping out of her line of sight. Foggy would have already had thirty heart attacks and called several warnings after him. She herself wasn’t too worried.

Well, admittedly, she was a _little_ worried. But he was Matt. He would be fine. She continued walking along the street like he had told her.

After about a hundred yards of stepping through dust, rubble and corpses, she heard a scraping noise above her. There was Matt—and of course he effortlessly hopped out from the side of the building, gripped onto a flagpole, and gracefully slid down the side of it with the flag chain. He landed on the street a few feet away with a loud huff. The backpack on his shoulder looked a little heavier as it bounced against his back.

“Find anything good?” she greeted him.

“Yes.” He left it at that, and she figured they could sort through it later because he would probably be missing at least seventy-five percent of the necessary vocabulary anyway.

“Any applesauce?”

“No.”

“All right. We shall continue Mission Applesauce in that case.”

Matt bounded off again, pure eagerness, practically diving head-first into the mess of houses and rubble. He was much better and faster at digging around than she was. Way faster than anyone else she'd ever known.

Karen knew he might take a while to reemerge. She looked around. Like a bizarre scene right out of a dystopian still life, there was an abandoned desk chair out in the street, next to the skeletal remains of another life fallen victim to the apocalypse. She tested the chair. It wobbled in its hinges—too much to be of any weight-bearing use. Still, its parts could come in handy.

She knelt down and took off her backpack, extracting a screw driver, pliers and the small leather case with a collection of bicycle wrenches that she’d bartered off of Jack a long time ago. Then she went to work, meticulously unfastening the screws that held the thing together. Her interest was mostly focused on the pneumatic part that adjusted the seat height.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she heard Matt coming back out of a heap of crumbled bricks, dust everywhere. He was holding his cupped hands out to her. They were not shaking.

“Karen, look this,” he told her excitedly.

She put down the bicycle wrench, stood up and peered inside just as he said, “A lot legs a lot.”

Ugh, probably a spider. But, nope, it wasn’t. It was a fucking centipede. She didn’t particularly like the critters. It crawled out of Matt’s palm and over the back of his right hand.

“Karen, what is it?”

“It’s a centipede.”

“Centa. Pent.”

“Cen-ti-pede,” she repeated. “Come on, say it properly.”

He grunted. “Cent. Ta. Peed.”

“Yeah, and I can even explain why it’s called that. Cent comes from the Latin number for hundred—centum. Pede stands for foot. It’s also Latin, I don’t remember what the exact word is. So it’s basically Latin for ‘a hundred feet’.”

Matt let it crawl onto his left hand. “Has a hundred feet?”

“No, probably not exactly a hundred. But it sure has a lot of them.”

Matt’s mouth pulled into a smile. “It feels. Feels a lot. Feels a lot, mm. Itchy.”

“You mean it tickles? Like little prickles on your skin, and it makes you smile?”

“Yes. Tickles.”

“Maybe you should put it down, I’m sure it’ll be happier on the ground.”

He held his hand up to his face once more as if he was trying to commit the thing to memory, then bent down and let it crawl back into the dust. It scuttled away underneath a stray rock. He tilted his head at it one last time before he turned to figure out what she was doing on the ground with the tools. Halfway there, he sneezed. The dust really fucked with his nose sometimes. She couldn’t help herself and let out a little laugh, then bent down to collect the fruits of her labor.

With some of the pieces she had deemed useful stowed away in her backpack, they continued up the street. They had gone maybe six or seven blocks, with Matt currently balancing on the remains of a narrow wall, barely wide enough for the soles of his shoes, holding his curtain rod horizontally in front of him like a tightrope walker. It very much looked like he’d done nothing else his entire life, and she figured the absence of the tremor made it all that much more enjoyable and easy for him.

He suddenly jerked to a stop. That caught her attention. She looked up at him, and any words she might have said were aborted by Matt putting his fingers to his mouth to shush her. He hadn't quite picked up the single-index-finger motion yet. His head slanted to one side, he listened intently, and then he pointed something out to her near the next intersection.

She peered intently in the direction indicated, and then she saw it. It was a deer. A magnificent, brown adult deer with a set of impressive antlers, maybe two hundred feet in front of them. It looked extremely out of place in the middle of their broken metropolis. She was suddenly reminded of that movie she’d once seen. Will Smith chasing a herd of deer through abandoned New York City in a race car. Life imitating art. How apt. Frighteningly apt.

Matt gestured to her to be quiet and stay where she was. Almost soundlessly, he slid down the wall and eased his backpack and the curtain rod to the ground, then slowly edged closer to the animal. She wondered how far he would get before it would smell the approaching humanoid.

She felt herself holding her breath, the closer he came. He managed to get within ten feet of the thing before it jerked its head up with a start, gave a wide-nostriled sniff, and bolted in the opposite direction of Matt on nimble hooves that clicked on the asphalt. Not that she could see it from where she stood, but she bet Matt was disappointed he hadn’t gotten to touch it. Maybe that was for the better. Wild animals made her think of rabies, tapeworms and all kinds of unpleasant shit she’d rather avoid close contact with. Foggy would have had a heart attack.

Once she approached him, he smiled at her. “Did you see?”

“Yeah, I saw.” She handed him his backpack and his rod. The sound of the deer's hooves could still be faintly heard, echoing like very distant gunshots through the wrecked city.

He turned his head back in the direction it had gone in. “It run away.”

“Yeah, deer are extremely shy. It’s a miracle you got as close as you did.”

That only widened his smile as he slid the pack back onto his shoulders. “It. What— what was _it_?”

“The animal? A deer. A male deer. A stag. They usually live way out in the woods. Guess they’re trying to find their way into the city now for food. There’s probably not much left out there to live on.”

He seemed happy with that information and gave a little shrug. “Is hungry. Looking for app-sauce?”

She gave a little chuckle. “I kinda doubt it, but who knows? Speaking of which…” She had spotted something. A sign peeking out of what was mostly debris and dirt now. It read ‘Ultra Service Center’. She pointed at it. “Matt, I think that used to be a gas station. Sometimes these things had grocery sections. Have you gone through it before?”

Matt seemed to scan it. “No. A lot, mm. Dust. I will look.”

“Want me to come?”

“Hm. Yes. No. Not… you look, you can, mm…”

“It’s okay, I get it. Go and do your thing. I’ll follow.”

It took a good amount of time for Matt to dig through the broken parts and collapsed windows and sheetrock. She helped as best as she could. But then, finally, Matt emerged with an armful of goodies and about ten layers of dust over every inch of him. But lo and behold, once they had wiped the dust off the little plastic containers, they turned out to be real, actual applesauce. Four tubs of what had once been a six-pack.

She gave a little whoop, and Matt grinned and asked, “ _This_ app-sauce?”

“Yeah, it _actually_ is applesauce. I can’t believe it. One of them is broken and it’s leaking. I think we better leave that one. But the others might still be good.”

Matt sniffed at the leaking one. “Smells okay.”

“Well, that’s a good sign.”

“We eat?”

“No, we need them for the cake batter, remember?”

“No, we eat this,” he tapped the broken tub with his index finger.

“Uh. I don’t know, Matt. It may have been lying here a long time. There’s probably dirt and bacteria and all kinds of other shit in it. It might have been nibbled on by insects, or something. I, uh, I really wouldn’t eat it.”

He sniffed at it again. “It is okay.”

“Matt, Foggy is gonna kill me if I bring you home and you end up puking and shitting all night from a spoiled tub of applesauce. I get that it’s tempting and probably smells really good, but let’s not eat it, okay?”

He scrunched up his face in an unhappy expression, but in the end seemed to agree to listen to her. She tried to placate him. “The cake will be great. You’ll love it. I promise. And you can have a spoon of applesauce before we use it, if you want to try it. Okay?”

He gave her a nod. “Okay, Karen.” Then he went back into the rubble and roamed around a little longer, extracting the odd piece of food and a few bottles of soda pop. Karen looked at them while he turned away and sneezed again.

“They’re all diet, and I think the sweetener degrades after a while. We can take them, but we may have to throw them away because I think they’ll pretty much be tasting of ass.”

He stuffed them into his backpack anyway, along with whatever else this little treasure trove had hidden away in spaces it seemed that only Matt could find.

When they were done, they made their way back to the apartment. Matt had them take a parallel street to their previous route, just to make sure they weren’t missing any opportunities. His heightened senses worked well enough for him out here, but sometimes it was a set of eyes that could make all the difference. He’d learned that by now.

About three blocks down, Karen spotted an abandoned RV. It was lying on its side, the walls dented and scorched, but otherwise it was intact. She went closer and tried to peer in through the windshield. It was useless. Too dark. The door in the back was locked, and she couldn’t reach the side door, which was now at the top. Matt had vanished in one of the buildings, so she called his name.

He came flying out of the broken window of the building next to her, displaying a perfect somersault before launching back to his feet. The little ninja. Was it the lack of tremor or her presence that was causing him to show off so much? He gave her a smile, huffing for breath. “Karen?”

She smiled back even if he couldn't see it, then waved toward the RV. “Do you think we can get inside this thing? It might have camping equipment and it doesn’t look like it’s been raided yet.”

Matt climbed up to the door in about two seconds, then turned and helped her up. The door was locked, probably the reason why it hadn’t been looted yet. It was a good thing Matt had his curtain rod. It helped them bust open the lock after a few good punches.

Matt slipped inside as if it were a manhole. She leaned her head in. “Want me to come?”

“No,” came his muffled reply. “Is not big a lot.”

It sounded like he was rummaging around inside for a few minutes. Then he handed her something through the door. A blue canister. A camping gas tank. Yes! Fucking score! More warm food.

He peeked his head back out. “Is all I find.”

“Yeah, but this is all we need for now. Come on.” She held her hand out to him and pulled him up through the door hole. “Foggy will smother us with wet kisses for this.”

And he did. Well, not literally. But she knew he’d love them for all the great stuff they brought back, and he did. He was beaming almost as widely as Matt was. There wasn’t just happiness. It was something else. She recognized it. Pride.

While they unpacked their backpacks, Matt excitedly told Foggy about their adventures. He didn’t even need to be prompted and tried to blurt everything out all at once. Predictably, it came out as lots of word soup until Foggy stopped him and made him retell it with more care. He talked about the penta-pede (close enough) and the steer. Karen had to explain that one. Leave it to Matt to mix the words together. Foggy was still super impressed.

It had been a good day. Still was. Tremor-free Matt was the best thing and it made for all kinds of happiness.

+-+-+-+-+

Karen had retreated to the storage room to check her rifle and see if it needed cleaning when she heard a noise behind her. Knuckles softly rapped on the doorframe. She thought it was Foggy, because knocking wasn’t Matt’s style. But when she turned around, it was indeed Matt lingering in the doorframe. Maybe it was another thing he’d picked up. Not a bad idea, though. He was always so quiet on his ninja feet.

“Hey, Matt,” she greeted him. “What’s up?”

“Karen, can you… you have, mm… have minutes?”

She smiled, and couldn’t help but respond, “Yeah, I have minutes. What do you need?”

“Can you show?”

“Show you what?”

“Music. How make. How _to_ make.”

She wasn’t sure what he was referring to. “You mean how to sing?”

“No. I mean, mm. Guee. Mm. Guittur?”

“The guitar?”

“Yes, guitar.”

Yeah, okay, that made sense. She’d offered to teach him before, and he’d told her that he wouldn’t be able to do it with the tremor. He had an amazing memory. She put down her rifle on the table and got up. “Yeah, sure, I’d love to.”

The smile that spread across his lips lit up his whole face. She always loved when that happened.

The guitar was tucked away in the corner and she wiped the dust off it before picking it up. They didn’t use it enough anymore these days—possibly because they’d exhausted her limited repertoire quite quickly after Matt had found the instrument and brought it home several weeks ago.

Foggy gave the two of them a curious look as they settled down together on the couch, but just smiled and then directed his attention back to one of Matt’s Braille books. He was still trying to get the hang of it—not just for Matt’s sake.

Karen placed the guitar in her lap with Matt sitting to her left. “Let me tune it first, okay?”

Matt watched her carefully. Not with his eyes, of course, but she could tell he was trying hard to study her movements, to learn what he was supposed to do. The D string creaked when she turned the peg to tune it. Hopefully it wouldn’t snap. His head still tilted at the sound.

When she was done, she paused, and wondered where to start. “So, uhm, how much do you know already about playing the guitar?”

He raised his head and squinted his eyes just slightly. It would be difficult for him to explain, she knew that. One of his hands reached out to point to the fret. “You touch here. Make different sounds.”

“Yeah, that’s basically it. You put your fingers on the strings on the different frets. A fret is— hold on, I think it’ll work better if I show you. Can we swap seats so you’re sitting on my right?”

Once they had, she gave him the guitar. He placed it on his thigh like Karen had. She felt for his left hand. “Here, you can feel the neck, right? It has raised vertical bars all over it. They’re called frets. Each fret represents a semitone. When you press your fingers onto the string between the frets, it will create the corresponding tone when you pluck the string. Does that make sense?”

He let his fingertips explore the neck of the guitar to feel the spacing of the frets. Then he instinctively put his fingers on some of the strings and pushed down on them, feeling it out. “Yes, Karen,” he finally said. Still smiling.

“Okay, next are the strings. There’s six of them. Each one plays its own note. From top to bottom it’s a low E, A, D, G, B and a high E. Do you want to just try and play them? Strum them. Just let your right thumb glide down the strings.”

He did it without her having to show him how.

“Okay,” she said, “Good. Now, uh, let’s start with a very simple chord. This one’s called E minor. You put the middle finger on the A string in the second fret, and the ring finger also in the second fret on the G string. Do you want me to show you?”

He tried, and she gently arranged his fingertips so that they sat in the right place. “Press down on the strings with your left hand, then try strumming again.”

It sounded like a proper E minor chord when he did. Matt smiled. It was going well so far.

“Are you ready for the next chord?”

He hummed as confirmation. Good enough.

“Let’s do D. There’s a song called ‘Lady in Black’ that you can do with just E minor and D.”

The D chord required the index, middle and ring finger on the three nylon strings, and Matt figured it out quickly. Then they practiced switching between the chords. It was a little choppy at first when he tried to arrange his fingers in the right places on the frets, but he got better and better, and she was once more reminded how fucking smart and eager to learn he was.

Teaching him the strumming rhythm was harder, especially in combination with changing the chords on the frets in tandem. His left hand and arm were still too weak, and always would be because of that fucking tremor. She could tell it was starting to bother him. She didn’t want him to get frustrated. Time to change tactics.

“That’s really good, Matt. Maybe I should teach you the song first before we move on. Do you want to give me the guitar back, and I’ll sing it, and then you try to do it again when we’ve got the melody down?”

“Okay,” he acquiesced, albeit a little too reluctantly.

She took the guitar back and played the two chords, and then started singing along to them. _“She came to me one morning, one lonely Sunday morning, her long hair flowing in the mid-winter wind. I know not how she found me, for in darkness I was walking, and destruction lay around me from a fight I could not win.”_

Matt listened intently. The chorus was easy, just a lot of, _“Aaa-haa-haaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha_ ,” and he hummed along in no time. She stopped after that.

“I only remember the lyrics of the first verse,” she admitted. “Maybe we can _aaa-ha-ha_ ourselves through the rest of it…?”

Matt didn’t seem to mind. She did the first verse and the chorus again and then handed the guitar back to him. “Here, you give it a try. I’ll sing with you.”

It was still a bit jerky, with pauses in between chord switches, but she let him take the lead. By the time they had hummed themselves through two verses and three choruses, Matt’s fingers found the E minor and D chords without fumbling, and he’d gotten the hang of the rhythm as well. It sounded like an actual song. She felt pride swell in her stomach.

“Wow, Matt, that’s really good. You’re learning quickly. I wish I could remember the whole song.”

“I like this one,” he told her with that big, proud smile on his face.

“I don’t remember who originally sang it.”

It was Foggy over on the futon who supplied, “Uriah Heep, or not?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, that rings a bell.”

“Also the from the 70’s, right?”

“I think so. Who knows, maybe it would have been on Matt’s CD.”

Matt seemed to perk up at that. “Karen, you can do CD? From my CD?”

Well, she had secretly tried to figure out how to play _Shambala_ a few weeks back. Or as secretly as you could with a feral who could hear a fly sneeze two miles away. She hadn’t perfected it yet, but maybe it was time to give it a spin. “I can try,” she offered hesitantly, but she also knew whatever she could produce would be more than good enough for Matt.

He was already giving her the guitar back, and she said, “Well then, let’s see if you recognize this one.”

Of course he did. Matt and Foggy joined in when they realized what she was playing. Foggy was off-key as usual, but Matt and Karen only sang louder so that it didn’t matter. It was glorious.

+-+-+-+-+

It was two hours later that Karen realized that the applesauce was a rare thing to have these days. It was as close to fresh fruit that they would get. She wished they could just eat it as it was, but the three little pots they’d found would just barely be enough to blend with the cake mix.

While she and Foggy were rummaging around in the kitchen to (hopefully) make their new goodies into something edible, she wondered how it was that Matt hadn’t risen from his nap to watch their every move. He’d usually be awake the second someone started handling food. Maybe it was the pills. Maybe they were finally giving his brain the chance to get the rest he so badly needed.

Foggy was pouring the cake mix powder into a bowl while Karen opened the applesauce and sniffed at it. She held it out to Foggy. “Do you think this is still good?”

He also sniffed at it. “Yeah, smells all right.” He took it from her and scraped the content into the cake mix. She gave him the other two pots as well.

As she watched him stir the mixture with an eggbeater she didn’t even know they had, she wondered about something from earlier. “Hey Foggy? Can I ask you something?”

He kept stirring the brown mass. “Sure.”

“Avocados at law. What is that about?”

She studied his expression, and there was something there she couldn’t quite make out. Had she messed up again? This shit was harder to tell on Foggy, because he wasn’t an open book without social filters. Not like Matt. She hated that part of trying to figure out emotions. He beat the cake mixture a little more angrily. Should she backpedal? “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No,” he interrupted, and stopped moving his arms. “It’s okay.”

A small sigh tumbled from her lips. “I hit a nerve, didn’t I?”

He nodded almost imperceptibly, focusing back on smoothing out the cake batter with the eggbeater. “Yeah. Kinda. It always… it reminds me of what could have been, you know? What should have been.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“No, I… it’s okay. I want to. Maybe I owe you that.”

“You don’t owe me shit.”

He sighed. “Maybe I don’t. Or maybe I do. It doesn’t matter. You wanna hear it?”

She leaned against the counter next to him. “Yeah.”

“Matt and I, we met at Columbia. All these years ago. 2010. God, it seems like such a long time ago.”

“You were roommates, right?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if there’s such a thing as fate, you know? We got stuck with each other, and we still are. He’s… uh…”

His movements slowed, but he didn’t stop stirring. “We, uhm, this was the year we graduated, I think. One night, we went out. There was alcohol involved. I don’t remember the details, but we were walking back to our room across campus. Stumbling, more like. He was different then. Different yet from when you got to know him. More carefree. He laughed a lot more. It was… I don’t know.”

The dough was getting too sticky and viscous, so he went to the purifier and added some water right into the bowl. With newfound energy, he took the stirring back up and continued his tale.

“It was before he became Daredevil. I didn’t know back then, but now it actually makes sense. God, why did I never see it before? But anyway. We were joking about something. You know, big, silly dreams of opening our own practice together. And I… well, the short version of it is, Matt was taking Spanish in college. Which you know. And I made some kinda off-hand remark about what lawyers means in Spanish. And what he said sounded like avocados. So it became ‘Nelson & Murdock – Avocados at Law’.”

She smiled to herself. This word, she actually remembered, even though she hadn’t used or even heard any Spanish in years. “I think you mean abogados.”

“It still sounds like avocados.”

“It has a B and a G. _A_ -bo- _ga_ -dos.”

“Don’t fucking smartass me. You’re missing the point.”

“No, I get it. It’s kinda cute.”

“We were gonna be the best damn avocados the city’s ever seen. Guess we never really had the chance.”

“But you made it. You made your dream happen. Your own practice together. You… _we_ had a good thing going.”

“Yeah, until the world got crapped on.”

“But we’re still here. I know it’s not the same, but we’re still a damn great team.”

And then she could see the smile replacing that sour undertone in the lines on his face. She considered it a small victory.

“Yep,” he said, “Damn great team indeed.” He let his eyes wander in the direction of the living room where Matt still seemed to be sleeping. And then his smile was directed at her. She looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. She heard him ask, “ _Your_ big dreams, what about them?”

She lowered her head. “Yeah, those circled the drain real fast after high school.”

“Why?”

She sighed. That was a good question. Just life fucking herself over for no reason at all? “I’m not sure I wanna talk about that. I mean, what’s the point, you know? It not like it matters anymore. I have nothing from that time to hold on to. You and Matt, you were a good thing. That’s what I want to remember.”

He nodded, giving her space. He was really good at that. He was their emotional centerpiece. It would have all fallen apart, long ago, without Foggy. She didn’t give him enough credit for that.

“Foggy?”

“Yeah?”

“I, uh…”

He looked at her, and she held his gaze, not sure what her brain had wanted to supply to finish that sentence. Her cheeks felt flush with unfamiliar embarrassment. “You keep telling Matt how much good he’s doing, how important and amazing he is. No one ever tells you that. Maybe it’s time someone did.”

He stopped stirring the dough, let the eggbeater sink against the rim of the bowl with a small clank. He looked lost for words—not something that happened often to Foggy Nelson. She’d made him speechless. She hoped it was a good thing.

His voice was small and abashed. “Thank you, Karen. That means a lot.”

She gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile, not sure what else to say. He half-heartedly started stirring the cake batter again, so Karen refocused on the task at hand. She pulled a frying pan from one of the cupboards. One of those heavy, cast-iron things with a glass lid. “We can totally bake this in here, if we put a lid on it and keep the heat low.”

“In a frying pan?”

“Yeah. I’ve never done it, but I think I read that it works if you don’t have an oven. It’ll be better than eating raw dough, or not? Just think about it. Actual cake. _Warm_ cake. The smell wafting through the apartm—”

“Okay, I’m sold.”

She chuckled. “Is it ready?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Okay, awesome. Let’s hope we don’t end up with a piece of blackened rock.”

“If we do, I’ll blame you and your frying pan idea,” he told her.

Once they had transferred the batter into the pan and put it up on their makeshift stove, it was just a waiting game. She told Foggy she’d keep an eye on it, and he happily retreated back to the living room.

She wandered over to window that overlooked parts of the street, studying all the little details she’d stared at way too often. Crumpled buildings and abandoned cars. Shards of glass from broken windows and bent streetlight poles. And a whole fucking lot of dust.

There wasn’t a lot to do while the cake did its thing. At some point, she was startled by a noise behind her. The door to the garage was being opened, ever-silent feet slinking through it to tap down the stairs.

It was Matt, and she frowned. He’d closed the door behind him before she could say anything. It was odd, to say the least. He would have smelled that they were cooking something. He would have come over and asked what she was doing. He would have wanted to stick around and watch her—ever curious, ever inquisitive.

A part of her wanted to go down and check what was going on, but there was a cake to guard, and that was really fucking important right now. So she tried not to worry too much and to make sure their little masterpiece would actually turn into one.

Well… it didn’t. Not a masterpiece, anyway. The Bunsen burner was hardly a precise cooking appliance, and she ended up burning parts of the base, but half an hour later, she placed the pan on a wooden board, and relished the smell of freshly baked cake that filled the kitchen. She never thought she’d smell anything this good ever again.

She picked at some of the uneven surface and popped the small piece that came away into her mouth. It was awesome. A little weird, maybe, but it tasted of chocolate cake with a hint of apple. Or something resembling it closely enough.

It was a little miracle, and she wanted to yell it out loud so the boys would come and join her for the feast. In the living room, Foggy was stretched out on the futon, lightly snoring. He must have given in to a nap when he’d joined Matt earlier. She didn’t have the heart to wake him, because the cake would need some time to cool down anyway.

Matt hadn’t reemerged from the garage, which was still odd. A hollow, unfamiliar pang in her gut smarted, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. It was worry, she realized. Because Matt didn’t usually go down there without a reason, least of all stay. Unless he was stewing over something.

A suspicion rumbled through her mind. With a decisive sigh, she found herself going downstairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, she looked around. There were no noises, and Matt wasn’t in sight. She was pretty sure he hadn’t gone out, he was smart enough not to without letting them know, so there was really only place he could be.

She carefully peered into the cab of the truck. And sure enough, there he was, hunched in the back seat with his socked feet pulled up, his arms wrapped around his shins. His face was completely hidden by the hollow between his knees and chest. The darkest fog of misery was shrouding his wiry frame. Her breath hitched in tandem with the furrowing of her forehead.

Her fingernails tapped lightly on the window, and she made her voice kind and gentle. “Matt? Do you mind if I come in?”

She waited. He didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge her. She could just leave. He’d get over it and come back up eventually. Or she could wake Foggy, and he’d know how to handle it. He always knew.

Before she had even finished that thought, her hand found the door handle and pulled the truck door open. Her voice was barely a whisper now, afraid to make the frail construct of uncertainty crumble by saying the wrong thing. She slid into the back seat. “Matt, I’m gonna sit here with you for a while, okay? You can tell me to leave, and I’ll go. Do you want me to go?”

She saw him rubbing his forehead from side to side on his knees, not sure if that was a no or just his way of saying, “It’s okay, you can stay.” Maybe it was a no. It probably was.

“It’s okay, I’ll leave. Do you want me to go get Foggy? He’s taking a nap, but I can wake him.”

She was babbling, giving him way too much information. She wasn’t good at this—positively sucked at it, in fact.

The pleather squeaked lightly as she slunk across it to get out of the cab, but then Matt’s utterly despondent voice stopped her. “Stay,” he mumbled. At least she thought he did.

The door clicked into its lock as she pulled it closed behind her, sliding a few inches closer to Matt. He stayed silent, and she didn’t know what to say. What _could_ she say? He wouldn’t talk unless she pushed him, but it wasn’t like she had any words to make any of this right.

So she just watched him in the half-dark, and saw how his left arm shook with the tremor he’d been free of for a whole day, and so badly wanted to be rid of entirely. He’d probably felt it returning a while ago, had come down here to wallow in the frustration and self-pity.

Well, they couldn’t have that now, could they? But what could she do? When Matt got like this, even Foggy needed a whole fucking hour sometimes to talk him out of it—and Foggy did the forehead hugging and touching and everything. The things that seemed to help the most. Things that she was too afraid to do. But still, maybe she could try.

It took her a full minute to come up with anything to start a conversation with. Or a monologue. It would pretty much be a monologue anyway. “Hey, uh... I know this is kinda...” Shit, she was stammering. “I’m not gonna say it will be okay, Matt. Because it won’t be. Because ‘okay’ would be, I don’t know, an intact city, a normal life, money, food, electricity. ‘Okay’ would be not living on scraps and not having permanent brain damage and not living in constant fear of being attacked by ferals or huge, scaly aliens.

“But since it’s _not_ okay,” she let out a cynical chuckle, “Geez, that is such an understatement. All of this sucks royally. So much so that sometimes I just wanna punch my fists through walls for the injustice of it all. How did we deserve this? Any of this? Any of _us_?”

She paused, studying him, looking for the slightest hint of acknowledgement. It wasn’t there. Just desolation and dread. She felt it seeping right into her soul to unwind the dark coils of those gloomy thoughts that she usually kept well hidden. Her voice was tired and deflated when she said, “Some days I wish— I wish I hadn’t survived, you know?”

It was true, and she’d never said it out loud, not in so many words. It felt strange admitting it here, now, to a shivering feral who might not even be listening to anything she was saying. She stayed quiet after that, and there was only their shallow breathing and an inconsequential solace in their mutual silence.

She thought about Foggy, thought about what he would say to Matt. But she wasn’t Foggy, even though she’d watched and listened to them interacting often enough. Sometimes in secret, although she would never admit that.

“You know, Foggy’s the one who’s made it all happen. This. Us. I really wouldn’t be here without him. I have a suspicion you wouldn’t be either. And I love him for that, but some days I also wanna hate him for it. If he hadn’t come to the shelter, I would probably be long dead. Killed by Eric. Or an alien. Friendly fire, for all I know. But it didn’t happen, because Foggy saved me, and then you saved me, and—”

Oh _God_. What was she saying? That sometimes she wished Matt hadn’t saved her life? Dammit, she was fucking this up so badly. “I don’t— Matt, I don’t mean to... mean to say you shouldn’t have saved me or that I regret that you did. That’s not— shit.”

She drew in a long breath, watched her fingers in her lap, picking at a loose flap of skin on her nailbed, and desperately tried to think of the right thing to say. “I’m bad at this. Really bad. I’m supposed to make you feel better, and instead I’m fucking it up. I’m sorry, Matt. I wish I knew what to say. I’m not helping, am I? I don’t know how to do this.”

When she looked up again, he had his chin propped up on his knees, staring blankly into the headrest of the seat in front of him. Maybe he was trying to line up words in his head, maybe he was gonna stay like this indefinitely. The multitude of scratches all across the left side of his face, red and angry against the pale skin, made him look even more pitiful. She didn’t know what else to give to him that could make any difference.

The silence settled heavily for long minutes that ticked by, but then Matt’s small but steady voice broke the quiet. “I wish you... wish you stay. You live. You fight. We are here, Karen.”

She frowned, not quite sure what he was trying to express. “Yeah, well, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go, you know?”

Something flitted across his face. Confusion? Frustration? She couldn’t really tell. She’d probably interpreted him wrong. He sighed and let his forehead sink back onto his knees, pulling his legs a little tighter.

Yeah, she couldn’t even do _that_ right—understand what he was trying to convey. She wanted to go, wanted to get Foggy. But then he let out a shuddered breath next to her that might as well have been a sob. Suddenly, there were tears in her eyes. It was then that she realized that maybe it wasn’t talking he needed from her.

“Hey, Matt, come here,” she whispered. She scooted closer until she was right next to him, and her arm came around his bony shoulders. The tremor was so pronounced against her own body that she wanted to give in to her first instinct to flinch and pull away. She pushed through it. _‘He’s Matt, he’s Matt, he’s Matt,’_ she repeated in her head. It seemed to work.

His initial reaction was to stiffen and counter her soft tug. She almost let go, not sure what it was that made her not to. But then he seemed to relax a little, and her hand softly rubbed his upper arm. “It won’t be okay, but at least we have each other, right? Maybe that's enough for us to get through it.”

He leaned a little closer, then hummed softly before he spoke. “Karen? You are scared? Of me? With this?” He held up his trembling left arm.

“No, Matt, I’m not scared. Just... it’s difficult to explain. I’ve had— I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”

“You do not like me touch.”

“Yeah, that has to do with it.”

“Did not have this. Shaking. With pills. Karen, not different. Me, I am not a lot different. With shaking. Not shaking. It is me.”

Oh fuck. Had she given him the impression that he was defining him by his tremor, by whether he had it or not? That he was to be liked less because of it? “You thought that this was all about the tremor? Us touching upstairs earlier? That I only did it because it wasn’t there?”

He made an awkward motion that might have been a shrug. He didn’t say anything, so she pressed on. “Oh, Matt. That’s not it. Not it at all. Whatever you are, it’s with or without the tremor. It’s just you, and I... I guess I’m still trying to get used to it. Some days it’s harder than others, you know?”

“I know,” he whispered, and she squeezed his shoulder through the fabric of his different layers of clothing. He spoke again, this time more assertive. “This,” he let his shivering left arm hover in the air in front of him, “will not be okay. Us, we will _be_ okay.”

She smiled, letting an unbidden wisp of emotion wash over her face. “Yeah, we’ll be okay.”

He pushed lightly out of her grasp. “Karen, you don’t like, is okay you not touch me.”

She gently pushed a strand of hair away from his forehead. “No, Matt, it’s fine. I’m getting used to it. I want to do it. You can tell I’m not lying, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now I have a question for you. Use that fine-tuned sense of smell of yours and tell me what you can smell.”

He tilted his head in the direction of their upstairs apartment. “It smells good. You make? Food? You made food?”

“Yeah, but not just any food. Foggy and I made cake. Real, actual cake. We baked it in a frying pan. And it should be just about ready to eat. Do you want to try it?”

As if she needed to ask. “Yes, Karen.” His face lit up into a warm, albeit somewhat shy smile. “It smells. Good.”

The sudden eagerness in his features made her meet him halfway with a smile of her own. “Yeah, I hope it’ll taste good, too. Come on, let’s go and try it.”

Foggy was still sleeping. They woke him and ate the warm cake straight from the frying pan. The applesauce had given it a bit of a strange, rubbery texture, and it was a little burnt at the bottom, but absolutely delicious, and the most amazing thing they’d eaten in a long time. It was halfway through the meal before Foggy even noticed Matt’s tremor had come back, and he seemed to smile a proud little smile over the realization that Matt didn’t seem particularly perturbed by it.

Karen took pride in the fact that maybe she hadn’t fucked it up entirely.

By the time the pan was empty, Foggy had chocolate crumbs in his beard, Matt was licking the last sticky chocolate residue off his fingers, and Karen felt nicely filled with cake and contentment.

As she watched her boys having the time of their life, she came to a realization. It had been a long time that she’d wished Foggy had never found her, that she’d wanted nothing more than to go to sleep one evening and never wake up.

Somehow, she wished she could tell them that. There were a great many things in her head that she wished she could tell them—like how much she appreciated that he’d taken a chance and let her in. How important both of them were to her. That she didn’t know what she’d do without them.

None of that made it past the tip of her tongue and stayed swirling around in the large pool of all the regrets she’d collected over the years. Maybe words would come out eventually. Maybe not. She hoped Foggy would know it anyway, and Matt too. She had a feeling they might. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking.

Matt broke her from her reverie when he carefully nudged her thigh. “Karen. We go find more app-sauce?”

“What?”

“Two. Morrow. We go find.”

She smiled. “Yeah, sure.”

+-+-+-+-+

**Author's Note:**

> I'm super sorry for not realizing that I (TeeJay) never published the little ficlet I wrote about how they even got the guitar. I didn't notice it until Ash pointed it out, so I have now rectified that. You can find it [on my Sunshine Tumblr](http://half-feral.tumblr.com/post/138597463211/the-best-days-of-our-lives).


End file.
